Archive for the ‘Developer’ Category

In March 2010, more than 130 million addresses will receive a 2010 Census form by mail or hand delivery. The 2010 Census will document the changes in our nation since the last decennial census in 2000, and tell us how we’ve evolved as a country. Because census data affect how more than $400 billion in federal funding is distributed to tribal, state and local governments, the census also will frame the future of our country and our communities for the next 10 years.

During Census 2000, the mail participation rate was 72 percent as of the April 2000 cut-off. About $85 million is saved for every one percent increase in mail participation. For these and many other reasons, we encourage everyone to participate in the 2010 Census.

The 2010 Census “Take10″ campaign includes an interactive map that allows you to see your current participation rates at state, county, and local levels and to compare them to your Census 2000 rates of participation. In support of the Census Take10 effort, Innovation Landscape in partnership with Google has built a Google Earth version of the participation map for use by the media and public.

We invite you to explore our map, link to it, and embed it in your website to help encourage maximum participation in the Take10 campaign.

Using Maps on Mobile devices is a challenge, especially when powerful features are needed.

iPhone and Andriod now fully support the standard JavaScript Google Maps API which makes it easier to develop accross platforms.

Care must be taken in mobile designs though due to:

Screen size

User interaction

Speed

For example, iPhone Safari is 10x slower to parse JS than desktop with limited caching. Networks also induce significant latencies which often dominate load times relative to total file sizes. Improve performance by compiling/obfuscating code.

Current Gmaps API (v2) is poorly designed for mobile apps. v3 means to address these concerns and enhance mobile support.

Only 35K in size (vs 190Kb in current v2)

Static map is built in

Optimized for mobile devices

~9s to load js and tiles on v3 vs over 18s on v2

Chrome and iPhone supported

no domain keys required!

Default UI construct so app can by automatically keep up with control updates

New geocoding API

v3 is based on a Model-View-Controller architecture to allow fast loading of initial models and wait for on-demand loading of required views. New features can be added as additional views/controllers with less impact to the overall code base.

Live blogging from Google I/O 2009 in San Francisco. Yesterday say the release of a number of product enhancements and directional annoucements:

Gmaps API v3 using an MVC programming model and optimized for fast loading on mobile devices

Open registration for Java Apps in App Engine

Lots of HMTL5 evangelism

A certified developer program for Gmaps

We were left with an expectation of more announcements in today’s keynote which is about to start. We’ll blog them here as they come out.

1st up is Steven Canvin from LEGO Group (each chair this morning had 6 standard 8 ‘peg’ LEGO blocks). He asks, “How many combinations can you create from 6 blocks? (Answer: 951,103,765) He gave a short history of LEGO Mindstorm and LEGO’s use of adult enthusiasts to help feed the R&D effort. Use of open-source SDK’s has helped drive Mindstorm product adoption.

Now Vic Gundotra (Google VP of Engineering) is back up. New personal communication/collaboration tool in early form. Will be open source.

Named Google Wave

Engineered by Lars Rasmussen and others. Stephanie Hannon is the PM. Developed in Sydney Australia. I/O attendees will be given developer beta accounts. The product will launch later this year.

Wave assumes a ‘convsersation’ which is a shared,hosted object which represents a discussion thread

Blends e-mail and chat paradigms into a common interface where ‘threads’ can be updated in non-real time ala e-mail or realtime ala chat depending on the connectivity of the recipients

Because the ‘thread’ is a hosted conversation recipients can make inline comments to previous replies without copying whole messages

Adding new participants to a thread allows then to ‘playback’ the sequential messaging up to the existing conversation ’state’

In real-time mode, users have the option to view others’ typing live

Private replies are supported

Drag and Drop attachments (photos demonstrated). Has inline processing to thumbnail images and transmit to the server prior to uploading the full photos. Requires Gears for this feature.

Can copy attachments (such as photos) from one conversation (Wave) into another or new message

Can link automated ‘agents’ to a wave to allow direct publishing via Wave API’s. Links go both ways so responses can be sent via the blog but replied to via other interfaces

Allows users to partipate in threads across multiple sites through a single interface by bringing active threads in the Wave Client – think Google Reader, but for discussion threads – so you can write, not just read

Connections created via an Embed API

Edits are carried through all instances of a Wave thread

Can use the editing feature to provide a collaborative environment for discussions. Change markup is provided to other users. Author receives a change notification.

Robot to do live translation of Wave messages – ‘Rosie’ with support for over 40 languages

Google is planning to open source most Wave code so that others could create ‘competing’ systems. Multiple instances could cross-communicate via invitation. Private replies within Wave server instances are not communicated outside of the originating server even in the case of ’shared’ Waves.

We’re at Google I/O in San Francisco this week. I/O is a great venue to learn about Google applications directly from the coders who right them while mixing with some of the best 3rd party developers in the world.

This marks our 3rd year at I/O and we’re looking forward to the next 2 days of sessions.

CEO Eric Schmidt opened the keynote address. His theme was ‘It’s Time’ in terms of platforms and opportunities to solve real user problems in simple ways rather than complex ones.

Vic Gundotra followed with a talk themed ‘A more Powerful Web, Made Easier’. Browsers have attained a 100x implovement in Javascript parsing in the last 10 years. Nearly 500 million people are using open source browsers. HTML 5 should offer a significant enhancement to developer options.

<canvas> tag for in browser drawing giving pixel level control of the browser

Roman Guy previewed ‘Donut’ the next version of Andriod. Search UI will remember how search results where ‘used’ on each device. Developers will be able to supply search terms in code for display in the Search UI. A text-to-speach API will allow developers to generate voice commands in various languages and accents. The underlying text to speech engine will be open source. Andriod UI will support ‘finger writing’ with handwriting recognition on the screen to filter results or jump through large lists.

Further improving custom event handling, Google has added 3 new event handler routines for capturing user interaction with the map via the GEView object: viewchangebegin, viewchange, and viewchangeend. This way you don’t need to use a custom function like the one we demonstrated previously.

New methods for getting the current view bounds and for determining the streaming status for imagery and terrain are also available.

Google Earth Enterprise customers get the ability to configure Plugin instances to use their custom Google Earth servers – providing Enterprise customers the option to use the GE Client, GE Plugin, and Google Maps as ways to disseminate custom datasets. Google has updated the API documentation and posted Release Notes for the upgrades.

Google Earth 5.0 is deservedly a major applicaiton release. While the new Ocean, Mars, and Historical Imagery features are getting a lot of the immediate attention, there are significant changes to the underlying KML engine that will enable developers to create much more featured 3rd party applications.

Google has updated their KML documentation and have highlighted new and updated features.

2. New <gx> tags for Animated Tours. These tags can be used to programmatically create Tours based on the new Tour Recorder options. You can control location, viewpoint, view time (see #5 below), balloon pop-ups, and even audio narrations – all via KML.

3. Major Upgrade to the Balloon Window HTML rendering engine

Now based on WebKit (as is Google Chrome)

Support for most CSS

Support for most Javascript

No support for cookies

Links to Local Content disabled by default (unless within a KMZ file) – users can override in the Google Earth options menu.

4. Polygons and Lines are now ‘hot’ clickable. This can create user-interaction issues with complex datasets so it’s best to check previous KML to make sure it still works as expected. Polygons will now autofill if normal/highlight behavior’s been set – also a potential issue if you have multiple overlapping polygons.

I’ll add additional changes as I find them.

5. You can now specify gx:timeStamps in LookAt and Camera views. Google Earth will set the sun angle and historical imagery accordingly. New documentation in the KML Time reference.